e-Democracy guru Steven Clift has done it again, organizing the first gubernatorial e-debate in Minnesota. His site smoothly brings together streaming videos posted by each of the candidates, daily blog posts and rebuttals, RSS feeds, flickr photos, and email updates. Taking place from October 9-19, several issues important to Minnesotans have already been debated, including health care, the environment and broadband access.
It’s like an election debate, except with actual content. Radical, I know.
I’ll be sure and bring this up when I’m speaking on e-participation issues at the IGF in Athens at the end of the month.
UPDATE 10/17, 6:00PM: Steven corrects me that his group has run these online forums for candidates since 1994! Check here for the history of his work.
Thanks Rik!
Actually, it is the only state-wide online candidate debate, but we did the first one in 1994. After 2001 we stopped doing them because they were too much work for volunteers. We received some funding this year almost from out of blue with the Blandin Foundation (they have a broadband initiative for rural Minnesota). Here are some of the older e-debates:
http://www.e-democracy.org/wiki/Past_E-Debates
Cheers,
Steven Clift
Oops, my enthusiasm got away from the facts again. Correcting…